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ESXi on AMD ChangWang CW56-58

01.05.2023 by William Lam // 7 Comments

It can be pretty difficult to find an AMD-based small form factor (SFF) kit that is compatible with recent ESXi releases. The large majority of these AMD SFF kits all use Realtek for their onboard network adaptor and Realtek does not have a driver for ESXi, nor have they expressed any interests in creating one.

This is also quite unfortunate, as there have been some pretty interesting AMD kits that have been released in the market, but they can not be fully utilized due to the network driver challenges. Prior to the holiday break, fellow VMware colleague Hilko Lantinga, who works in our End User Computing (EUC) division had reached out about a new AMD kit that he had just acquired and has been very happy with after putting it through its paces, especially from a power efficiency standpoint for his updated VMware Homelab.

The system is from a vendor called ChangWang, which I was not familiar with and the AMD kit is the CW56-58, which is based on an AMD Zen 3 architecture (7nm) and what stands out immediately is that this system includes four built-in network adaptors (hint: they are all compatible with latest ESXi 8.0 release)! I asked if he would be willing to sharing his thorough review with the community as this could be a really interesting system and below is Hilko's detailed write-up in his own words.


The following content below is a contribution from Hilko Lantinga.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere 8.0 Tags // AMD, homelab

DFI GHF51 - Worlds smallest AMD Ryzen SBC

04.19.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Awhile back I came to learn about an interesting AMD single board computer (SBC) from a company called DFI, which specializes in building embedded solutions and industrial motherboards. There are a number of vendors in this space, including OnLogic, Rugged Computers, ASRock Industrial to name a few and Bivrost which I had recently came to learn about. The Industrial vertical is actually a really interesting segment of the market that includes manufacturing, oil, gas and utilities and is often associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as the Industrial IoT (IIoT) market.

The demands and requirements of the Industrial IoT market is wildly different from your typical Enterprise datacenter, especially when you think about some of the harsh environments that hardware must run whether that is a manufacturing facility to a remote oil rig. It is not uncommon that the hardware used must be able to withstand extreme temperature changes with greater levels of reliability but also longer duration of support and product availability for up to 10 years!


With all that said, I was pretty intrigued with their latest offering called the GHF51, which comes in at an ultra tiny 1.8" inches and is dubbed the worlds smallest board with an AMD Ryzen CPU. You can see how tiny the SBC is compared to a lego mini-figure pictured above.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi Tags // AMD, DFI, esxi, IoT

ASRock AMD "NUC" Gen 2 Platform

12.20.2020 by William Lam // 9 Comments

It has been about one year since I first got hands on with ASRock's first AMD "NUC" platform dubbed the 4x4 BOX.

A couple of months back, ASRock launched their 2nd generation of the 4x4 BOX platform which adds support for AMD's Ryzen 4000U series mobile processors with the introduction of the 4x4 BOX: 4800U (Ryzen 7), 4500U (Ryzen 5) and 4300U (Ryzen 3) models.

Loving the chassis redesign (left) compared to Gen 1 (right)

The exterior box looks much brighter and it oddly looks familiar … 🤔 All I can say, is good taste @ASRockUSA pic.twitter.com/GR0su7eFaR

— William Lam (@lamw) October 17, 2020

One immediate difference between the original 4x4 BOX (right) is the slimmed down chassis design, which gives it that classic "compact" look of a traditional NUC. The updated design definitely looks cleaner.

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab Tags // AMD, NUC

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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